Book Description

Abstract: Real-world systems are complex and often difficult to construct, requiring a significant amount of time and effort. Designing new systems may require extensive testing and, if not successful, can result in expensive construction costs. Computer simulations provide a means of potentially avoiding unnecessary expense and speeding up design of a system by allowing designers to create, test, and adjust designs without physically building them. Although a simulation typically can't guarantee a perfectly accurate representation of a real-world system, it can provide the designer with an indication of whether the simulated design will be successful. If the simulation indicates problems with the design, then the designer can investigate and correct the issues before attempting to build a physical system from that design. Object Oriented design in software development is a popular design practice that involves "componentizing" the pieces of a software system into independent logical pieces, which promotes reusability and insulates the software from the impacts of changes in the system. An object oriented approach to building a simulation of a realworld system offers these benefits as well, allowing changes to be made to the simulation without impacting the fundamental design of the simulation or affecting other pieces of the system and potentially allowing software components to be reused for other purposes outside of the simulation. This thesis focuses on designing an architecture for the simulation of a real-world system using object oriented software engineering techniques. The real-world system being simulated in this thesis is a vehicle, in this case a hybrid vehicle, designed by The Ohio State Challenge X team [6]. The architecture for the simulation of the vehicle has been analyzed and abstracted as components, which allow parts of the system to be modified without affecting other parts. For instance, the component representing the hybrid vehicle could be switched with another component that represents a different hybrid vehicle or even a non-hybrid vehicle without impacting the rest of the simulation, provided that both components have the same basic interface. This thesis does not focus on modeling the vehicle itself, that effort is part of another master thesis. In this thesis the focus is on designing architecture for simulation into which any vehicle that conforms to the contracts (interfaces) can be simulated. This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of the simulation architecture as well as the design of "real time" driver and telemetry components based on a responsive GUI (Graphical User Interface)